Scott Alexander Reviews Thiel’s Zero to One

And it was Marx’s warning: businesses will compete so viciously that nobody will get any money, and eventually even the capitalists themselves will long for something better. Another company that wants Apple’s reputation would need years of successful advertising and immense good luck, so Apple’s brand separates it from the competition and from the economic state of nature. Two monopolistic companies with more money than they knew what to do with started super-basic-blue-sky research centers that ended up creating many of the technologies that shaped the modern world (Bell Labs, started by AT&T, helped invent the transistor, the laser, information theory, UNIX, C, C++, radio astronomy, etc; PARC, started by Xerox, helped invent Ethernet, laser printing, the personal computer, graphical user interfaces, object-oriented programming, bitmaps, and the LCD.)

Source: slatestarcodex.com